John B

My name is John and I attend Elizabeth High School in Elizabeth, NJ. Bluestamp Engineering was an amazing program as I created my own robot while adding modifications to my creation. My starter project was the Big Time Watch and my main project was the Omni-Directional Robot. The reason I selected these projects was that I was inspired from my time at Bluestamp the year before after building the Line-Following Hexbug. My experience at Bluestamp this year has given me more knowledge and this has directed me toward the path that I would like to take in the future.

For my final milestone I added a carbon fiber fabric to add an esthetic appeal and I started to program a Raspberry Pi in order for me to use it with a LIDAR sensor to make the robot be autonomous. I will not be able to complete this within my time at Blue Stamp, but I will continue to design and update my robot.

I finished my second milestone of my Omni-Directional robot, which was to complete the hardware of the robot and attach the motors and the Arduino. Between the first and second milestone I changed some aspects of the schematic including changing the breadboard to a perf board to make a more solid connection. I as well added supports on the sides without the wheels to keep the board together. The problems I faced between the first and second milestone had to do with moving the circuitry and making sure that the robot was properly balanced. The reason moving the circuitry had been difficult was because when I moved the wires from the bread board to the perf board I experienced technical difficulties due to me creating loose connections. The balancing of the robot was difficult because I needed to make it as perfect as possible to limit the amount of drag on the robot.

I completed my first milestone for the Omni-Directional robot which was to complete the coding for the vex motors. In my code I give buttons on the PS2 remote controller different functions. The gamepad on the controller allows my robot to move right, left backwards and forwards. The R1 Button allows the robot to turn clockwise, and the L1 button allows it to turn counterclockwise. The R2 button gives the robot an extra speed boost, and the L2 button stops the robot completely.

The problems I had with the coding was that I could not test the controller because I was unsure of the wiring to the Arduino. I found the relationship between the example code and the Arduino, saying which pin corresponds to the dongle pins. Another problem I had with the wiring was connecting the grounds because I did not have enough ground pins, to solve this I used a small bread board in order connect them and only use two out of the three grounds.

For my starter project I created the “Big Time Watch”. I chose this project because I found it very interesting how a digital clock works and what components are made to have the creation work. The watch works with a microcontroller that is basically the computer of the watch. The power that is used in the initial start in the light up of the time frame when the button is pressed is taken from the capacitor and then the rest of the power is supplied by the battery. From here the capacitor is recharged and ready to repeat the process. The resistors are used to limit the the amount of current flowing through the circuit. The way the watch works is that it uses the 32kHz crystal as a counter that after it counts down from 65535 to 0, it is a total of a second. From here the microcontroller takes this information and stores it, and after this has been repeated 60 times, it adds a minute to the watch. The watch is programable, so that you are able to set the time by double clicking the button on the right side and holding the button down the second time which will then allow you to change the time. The problems I had the when building the watch is the box which, held the circuit not fitting in the given proportions of the kit, so I used a filer to to shave down the plastic in order to make it fit.